Letters
Editors: In his Summer 2003 "Editor's Page," Mitchell Cohen makes an arresting statement: "Recall doves insisting that UN scrutiny could reveal all weapons of mass destruction sequestered in...
...Last fall he expressed great "trepidation" about attending an antiwar rally in the United Kingdom because "mass demonstrations regardless of the righteousness of the cause" are "the political theater of the left, and not something with which I should be associated...
...Also, I found his insidious combination of "pessimists" and Baathists in the same sentence akin to character assassination: doubting that the war will go well equals sympathizing somehow with the Hussein regime...
...She claims that "the connection of these charities to the funding of hatred has now been amply documented in a report entitled 'The Foreign Exchange of Hate: IDRF and the American Funding of Hindutva' that may be accessed online (IDRF being the acronym of the India Development and Relief Fund, the chief charity in question...
...If we also count the victims of Saddam's wars against Iran and Kuwait, we exceed the current toll of the postwar fighting by three orders of magnitude...
...Ritter I, who denounced "nonexistent" enforcement of UN resolutions, or Ritter II, who asserts the non-existence of WMD...
...But Christie's assumptions are dubious...
...It is distressing to note that you as editors and Nussbaum as writer made no attempts to either contact the IDRF for its version of its charitable activities nor did you contact me or my co-authors of the report titled "A Factual Response to the Hate Attack on the IDRF" (http:// www.letindiadevelop.org/thereport/) . What you and Nussbaum have done is a smear job on an organization founded by Vinod Prakash, a former World Bank official...
...The accounts I have read—I write two weeks after Kelly's tragic death—indicate that although Kelly was unhappy about how the British government made its case for war, he continued to believe that Iraq's pursuit of WMD had been very real, dangerous, and not nonexistent...
...And, it is now clear, the application of that force, if it can succeed at all, must entail a horrific level of violence...
...I understand that Ritter now concedes this last transaction was a mistake...
...For instance, they want court orders against government agencies to be enforceable only so long as the head of the agency at the time of the court's order remains in office...
...Ritter managed to address the Iraqi Parliament in the same month (September) that he was reluctant to be around "the left...
...Algeria comes to mind...
...Laws of war require a shared military culture and a sense of enlightened self-interest...
...Does Galbraith think that any probable postwar environment will see violence on a comparable scale...
...Why waste UN resources in a hunt for something nonexistent...
...Ross Sandler and David Schoenbrod say they're concerned about the undue influence of a "controlling group" of lawyers and experts who have somehow wrested control from federal judges, citing the obviously flawed settlement in Wilder v. Bernstein as if it were today's norm...
...There needs to be a careful distinction here...
...Freedom of expression does not entitle you and Nussbaum to spread vicious lies...
...My own sense is that "the antiwar analysis" will prove "correct, in broad outline" when DISSENT / Fall 2003 109 the regime we destroyed seems even remotely preferable to what we have inflicted and suffered...
...This was the great flaw of what they see as the "model" settlement in the New York City child welfare case, Marisol v. Giuliani...
...That later sentence merely observes that pessimists and Baathists often agreed about the likely course of the war, which they did...
...I mention "pessimists" first in the seventh paragraph, while the sentence containing both words appears in the sixteenth...
...Guardian, October 7, 2002...
...Now, almost three years after its end, the approximately hundred thousand abused and neglected children of New York City have no guarantees that the critical reforms spurred by the lawsuit—better training for child welfare workers, smaller caseloads, and increased supervision of foster care agencies, for example—will continue...
...The City did, conditions for foster care children improved, and the order terminated on schedule...
...Weak eighteenth-century European states almost invariably observed the laws of war in contests with much more powerful European enemies...
...But because we have a long lead time for each issue, you have to send us your letter within three weeks of getting an issue of Dissent in order to get it into the next issue...
...I worked on that case as a lawyer...
...Not too bad, but far from perfect...
...Americans will still win, but the costs are going to escalate...
...Editors: Daphne Eviatar characterizes our book, Democracy by Decree ("Sue the Bastards...
...The authors claim they want to "keep the courthouse door open" to victims...
...If Iraq posed no threat, why should it have to renounce aggression...
...To Letter Writers • We welcome succinct letters from our readers...
...Editors, In the Summer 2003 issue of Dissent, Martha Nussbaum writes that some Indian-American charities are supporting anti-Muslim and anti-minority activities in India ("Genocide in Gujarat: The International Community Looks Away...
...We accept e-mail submissions to editors@dissentmagazine.org, but request that you provide a street address and phone number...
...Iraq is a huge country...
...But if the court's mandates simply dissolve when a government official quits, or after some arbitrary date has passed, what's the agency's incentive to comply...
...they are enforced by shame, the threat of reprisal, and possibly by the threat of postwar prosecution...
...But it's a marathon, not a sprint...
...There is a large Shia population with whom our relations could deteriorate quickly if their leaders don't like our rule...
...the U.S...
...Cohen, intent on encouraging us in "reordering [our] thoughts," offers up this sentiment as an example of prewar wrong-headedness...
...Lucky for him...
...Instead he left the program under the authority of the mayor without court-ordered milestones or court- designed plans...
...Well, let's leave aside the threat Saddam posed to people within Iraq's borders and just note that Ritter declared moments later, in the same speech, that "Iraq must renounce violence and aggression against all its neighbors...
...Those doves didn't propose that Iraq's dictator had spent years frustrating inspections in order to save a nonexistent arsenal...
...In terms of the title of her essay, we are for not suing, or so she claims...
...and third world firepower the "enemies" of the future would be nuts not to pull out all the stops— it's their only chance to fight back and even the contest...
...Eviatar fails to even mention our proposals...
...And if Ritter is dependable how was he able (earlier on) to accept four hundred thousand dollars from a pro-Saddam businessman, Iraqi-American Shakir al-Khafaji, to underwrite a documentary about— you guessed it—arms inspections in Iraq...
...We reserve the right to edit letters down to fit our space and to choose which shall be printed...
...I urge readers who come to the same conclusion to write their representatives...
...in many statements he has praised the RSS as a fine organization, utterly failing to mention or criticize its role in fomenting hatred and perpetrating genocide...
...My greatest complaint about it is how quick he was to draw conclusions...
...Before it started, I sat down and handicapped the war (which I unequivocally opposed...
...the post-war occupation is certainly going to be ugly...
...Where I think we all got it wrong was in the ratio of wounded to killed...
...As he told me in a recent interview, reforming a government bureaucracy takes far longer than politicians realize...
...Conditions often do not improve and sometimes worsen...
...It means that the efforts to establish some "laws of war" are out the window because law can only apply to equals, and with a mismatch like the one that exists between U.S...
...does anyone remember...
...For the full magnitude of that "if," I refer Cohen to the hawk turned dove who insisted on the nonexistence of Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction throughout the long run-up to war, former UN chief weapons inspector Scott Ritter (who also pointed out that resistance by a totalitarian state to international inspection teams riddled with CIA assets was rather to be expected...
...The protectors will need to be protected...
...military force—not the Security Council resolution—pushed Saddam to admit them (for yet another wild goose chase...
...As Smoler points out, we do not know the activities of the U.S./UK Special Forces in Iraq, we do not know what the actual plans and timetables for the war were, and we have no idea what Iraqi casualties were...
...The Japanese meticulously observed the laws in 1905, when they initially seemed to be the weaker party, and flouted them in the 1930s, against a China they grossly overmatched...
...And for this reason, the antiwar analysis is proving correct, in broad outline...
...All this could be foreseen much earlier...
...Such consequences should matter to readers of Dissent...
...The point is not about any particular prediction...
...This counts only the dead and ignores the regime's taste for rape, mutilation, and torture...
...They hurt the little and the great...
...The postwar situation is disturbing for a number of reasons, and cause for some pessimism, but not yet for dystopian pessimism...
...Nor does Rao even deny a relation between IDRF and the RSS...
...Saddam has 150,000 secret police who will not physically disappear...
...Some members of the antiwar movement audibly hoped for an American defeat, or at least more American losses, so that we might be properly chastened, but I would never contend that typical opponents of the war were "Baathist sympathizers...
...Mercifully...
...We are unable to acknowledge letters...
...110 DISSENT / Fall 2003 His better way, which we described in detail in the book, was to approve a new consent decree that enforced rights, but declined to give control of New York City's foster care program to the lawyers...
...Letters must be no more than 500 words, typed, double-spaced, and carry the full address and name of the sender...
...Lawyers and judges have learned over the past thirty years to craft decrees that give government officials the flexibility they need while still enforcing the law...
...Better to divert them elsewhere, say, to the Congo...
...We are joined in these observations by some plaintiffs' attorneys who have handled consent decrees and by many judges who have supervised them...
...How long this situation will last is anyone's guess...
...Consent decrees fall under the control of a few lawyers who operate with almost no involvement of the judges in whose name the decrees go forward...
...The report that I cite is careful, unbiased, and convincing...
...Editors: In his Summer 2003 "Editor's Page," Mitchell Cohen makes an arresting statement: "Recall doves insisting that UN scrutiny could reveal all weapons of mass destruction sequestered in Saddam's fascist state...
...I think the danger right now is that without effective inspections, without effective monitoring, Iraq can in a very short period of time measure the months, reconstitute chemical biological weapons, long range ballistic missiles to deliver these weapons, and even certain aspects of their nuclearization program...
...Perhaps it is worth recalling that there were no inspections between December 1998 and 2002, and that only the threat of U.S...
...Our least scrupulous antagonists are most likely to scorn laws of war if they think that they will gain an advantage by doing so, and in current debates relative military power is almost certainly overstated as a cause of terror and atrocity...
...While some opponents of the war wound up as de facto apologists for the Baathists, most opponents of the war had no wish to see Saddam's regime preserved (although they refused to endorse the only means likely to destroy it...
...James Levy thinks me guilty of something akin to character assassination, complains of my quickness at drawing conclusions, and subsequently draws one of his own...
...Second, the money is largely used for cultural activities that are highly inflammatory in character, in particular for the camps of the Bajrang Dal, where young Hindu boys are taught the ideology of Hindutva and where hatred and fear of Muslims are openly advocated...
...Andrew Christie and I have an "if . . then" problem...
...Anyone who imagines otherwise has a wobbly grasp of totalitarian politics...
...Yet, the book we actually wrote argues that courts should enforce the law against government, but in ways that avoid the little known, but important unintended consequences of institutional reform litigation...
...This has historically been between 6:1 and 10:1...
...Do the current Iraqi guerrilla and terror tactics, combined with Coalition responses, amount to "a horrific level of violence...
...My guesses: the war would take 14 to 20 days, cost the Iraqis 61,000 killed, wounded, and missing (military and civilian) and about 400 U.S./ UK killed, wounded, and missing...
...Editors: As a professional military historian I found Fred Smoler's article interesting ("Cakewalk: Getting It Wrong," Summer 2003...
...To start, he doesn't differentiate lethal capacities from stockpiles...
...My April 1 statement was that one cannot subdue "a large and hostile city without destroying it completely...
...Ritter declared to Saddam's minions that "the truth of the matter is that Iraq today is not a threat to its neighbors and is not acting in a manner which threatens anyone outside its borders...
...Those few lawyers who end up supervising the decree control the management of huge public institutions and do so for decades...
...In fact, some of their suggestions come close to slamming it shut...
...More than a few people came to agree with Ritter as he went about very publicly making his case seven months before the war...
...The Associated Press has documented at least three thousand Iraqi civilian dead...
...Sandler and Schoenbrod refuse to recognize that court orders are often the only way to make sure the bureaucrats make it to the finish line...
...And if the agency has begun to change to meet the decree's demands, what's to keep it moving in the right direction after those demands are gone...
...The invocation of Algeria suggests that he does, but if he means either the Algeria of the colonial war or the Algeria of the current civil war, the violence in postwar Iraq is again down by orders of magnitude...
...I am one of the authors of a report rebutting the allegations made in the "Foreign Exchange of Hate" report...
...When we settled, we knew we were dangerously dependent on the good faith of the city commissioner, Nicholas Scoppetta, and the expert panel advising him, to make the most of the brief two-year decree...
...As I recall, we insisted that the UN inspectors should be given time to do their job so that, if there were any weapons to be found, they would find them...
...This little trick was used ad infinitum to try to discredit anyone who had doubts about the Iraqi venture and is both misleading and unworthy of an author doing a fair job at putting over a serious argument...
...Christie implies that both men were victimized by smear campaigns because they told the truth...
...If you or Nussbaum can show that even a dollar has gone from IDRF to fund Bajrang Dal camps please give your readers the specific details...
...Like the Europeans and Americans in the 1880s-1890s, "we have the Maxim gun and they have not...
...Ritter, a registered Republican who voted for DISSENT / Fall 2003 107 George W. Bush, was greatly relieved that demonstrators came "not only from the left" but from "the mainstream...
...It is that our combat prowess bears little on the miseries of garrisons and occupation...
...Iraq today is challenging the special commission to come up with a weapon and say where is the weapon in Iraq and yet part of their efforts to conceal their capabilities, I believe, have been to disassemble weapons into various components and to hide the components throughout Iraq...
...Chou En Lai's admirable caution about the significance of the French Revolution springs to mind ("too soon to tell...
...military probably has a fair idea how many Iraqi military casualties were inflicted but will guard and suppress the figure...
...Ritter's letter of resignation declared UNSCOM to be "hobbled by unfettered Iraqi obstruction and nonexistent Security Council enforcement of its own resolutions...
...Therefore, drawing "lessons" from the incident is a somewhat dubious undertaking at this stage...
...Had she come to grips with them, and had she stated her arguments against them, if she has any, we might have had a useful dialogue about a serious problem that concerns public interest advocates, their clients, and the rest of us...
...Yet these qualms about his political company do not extend to Iraqi fascists and their supporters...
...I stand by my claims...
...For example, Judge Robert Ward, who recently passed away, told us that one of the lessons he learned from supervising the New York City foster care case called Wilder v. Bernstein for twenty-one years was that he had to find a better way...
...The oil fields, the cities and the ports will need to be protected...
...In a private memorandum to a potential presidential contender in November 2002, I wrote the following: . . .while the impending war on Iraq may prove to be fairly easy...
...That's not what these authors are after...
...IDRF has raised about ten million dollars in the past twelve or thirteen years and disseminated it across India for disaster relief, child welfare, education, and rural development...
...But now...
...The reply authored by Ramesh Rao and others is diffuse, obfuscatory, and unconvincing...
...Here is another passage from the same essay, which doesn't read so badly now: The fact remains that Iraq is presently governed by a very effective armed gang, numbering in the scores of thousands...
...Ritter may have gone from hawk to dove, but people on the left should be reserved about making him a standard bearer...
...Surely the reporting was fair and balanced, as they like to say on Fox News...
...Mayors think in terms of four years, he said...
...does anyone remember...
...What this report shows (and other sources have confirmed) is that almost no money from this allegedly charitable organization goes to fund welfare or general poverty relief...
...But Ritter and Kelly, a distinguished microbiologist who went to Iraq thirty-seven times for the UN, seem to have disagreed about the truth...
...Well, it says we're back to 1898 and the Battle of Omdurman, where Horatio Kitchener and his 13,000 Anglo-Egyptian troops smashed 55,000 Sudanese and inflicted more than 20,000 casualties for the loss of about 50 men...
...India, just in one year, 2000-2001, received about a billion dollars in foreign donations from charitable organizations, and the majority of the money went to Indian Christian organizations...
...They will use terrorism, "dirty" bombs, poisons, chemicals, and anything else they can get their hands on to redress the imbalance...
...Germany seemed much the stronger belligerent in the summer of 1941, the Soviet Union much the weaker, but the Germans scorned the laws of war, while the Soviets initially begged that they be adopted...
...In this war the ratio could have been as low as 1:1...
...Grammar as it appears on the NewsHour's Web site.] He argued likewise in a New Republic article...
...Though subjected to a retaliatory smear campaign and greater pressure than that which brought about the suicide of David Kelly, Ritter persisted in telling this truth, and no one who heard or read the evidentiary case he laid out could avoid its conclusion: Iraq disposed of its stocks of chemical and biological weapons after the 1991 Gulf War, its nuclear program had been destroyed, and it had not reconstituted those programs...
...James K. Galbraith writes that he was correct to predict that the occupation and reconstruction of Iraq "must entail a horrific level of violence," that "the antiwar analysis is proving correct, in broad outline," and that "Algeria comes to mind...
...But Iraq's Parliament was no more than its dictator's tool...
...On August 31, 1998, Ritter, who had just quit the UN Special Commission inspecting Iraq, told the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Iraq still has prescribed weapons capability...
...It will therefore continue to offer stiff resistance first to occupation and later to reconstruction, until that gang is destroyed, root and branch, by a far superior force...
...Personal agendas substitute for rights, diluting legislative and executive responsibility at the expense of elected officials and of the voters to whom they are responsible...
...It is admittedly easy to misunderstand the meaning of recent events...
...And if, in Christie's words, Ritter's "evidentiary case" demonstrated that Baghdad "disposed" definitively "of its stocks of chemical and biological weapons" and its nuclear program in 1991, then doves should have protested last fall's Security Council resolution—a 15-0 vote—demanding that Saddam readmit inspectors...
...All this makes comparisons of Ritter to David Kelly inappropriate...
...If so, compared to what...
...Or Not," Summer 2003), as arguing that state and local officials "should be allowed to run [government] as they see fit—no matter that they'd proven unable or unwilling to do so in accordance with the law...
...I agree...
...I am surprised that Cohen didn't hear...
...Letters will not be returned to senders unless they are accompanied by stamped, selfaddressed envelopes...
...and third world firepower, the 'enemies' of the future would be nuts not to pull out all the stops...
...Unintended and unwanted consequences regularly appear, but rigid court procedures make it difficult to adjust...
...Whom to believe...
...And they want every decree to start with an end date, at which time the court's order would disappear, regardless of whether the government has complied with it...
...But equality of power is of dubious relevance, for the strong are at least as likely as the weak to ignore the laws of war...
...We devote an entire chapter to specific proposals for how to "keep the court house door open" to victims, protect their rights and still preserve local democracy...
...Yes, he would probably claim that he went as a soldier of peace...
...Iraq's military forces collapsed outside the city...
...The planes and tanks are powerful and discriminating but useless once the open battles stop...
...I urge readers to study the documents for themselves...
...What does this war say about the future of military operations...
...Exhumation and identification of the Baathists' Iraqi victims is a laborious process, but the current estimate of the number we expect to find is three hundred thousand...
...And Scoppetta, once hailed as the child welfare agency's savior, has since left the job...
...If Ritter was right to insist on "the nonexistence of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction," then inspections were obviously unnecessary...
...Similar conclusions were reached independently by an important study published in the Financial Times, February 21, 2003...
...But people writing for political quarterlies necessarily draw tentative conclusions about very recent events, and historical perspective does not always settle questions The charge of character assassination via the linkage of pessimists and Baathists is puzzling...
...Judge Ward ordered that even this decree would terminate after two years provided that the City showed it could advance its own remedial plan in good faith...
...But as they well know, Wilder, filed in 1973, is nothing like the cases brought and settled today...
...Funds are targeted, first, at organizations for Hindus only...
...The right course at this point is clearly a full congressional investigation of this alleged charity...
...Levy's conclusion is that "the efforts to establish some 'laws of war' are out the window because law can only apply to equals, and with a mismatch like the one that exists between U.S...
...Editors: Fred Smoler makes the easy point that I and others mis-predicted the immediate outcome of the battle for Baghdad...
...DISSENT / Fall 2003 111...
Vol. 50 • September 2003 • No. 4
